Check out some blogs that use quartz

What is your reason to blog, for yourself? If so I run (used to run gitea) forgejo and just spam everything in issue threads on specific repositories

this uses 150mb of ram, basically 0% cpu

forgejo is actively working on federation, it is there not sure how done it is I don’t use it.

I use the parsedown library with a custom PHP index page to serve markdown files as HTML.

If Jekyll isn’t your jam, then Hugo probably won’t be, either.

I have a simple workflow based on a script on my desktop called “blog”. I Cask it with “blog Some blog title” and it looks in a directory for a file named some_blog_entry.md, and if it finds it, opens it in my editor; if it doesn’t, it creates it using a template.md that has some front matter filled in by the script. When I exit the editor, the script tests the modtime and updates the changed front matter and the rsyncs the whole blog directory to my server, where Hugo picks up and regenerates the site if anything changed.

My script is 133 lines of bash, mostly involving the file named sanitization and front matter rewriting; it’s just a big convenience function that could be three lines of typing a little thought, and a little more editing of the template.

There’s no federation, though. I’m not sure what a “federated blog” would look like, anyway; probably something like Lemmy, where you create a community called “YourName”. What’s the value of a federated blog?

Edit: Oh, I forgot until I just checked it: the script also does some markdown editing to create gem files for the Gemini mirror; that’s at least a third to a half of the script (yeah, 60 LOC without the Gemini stuff), which you don’t need if you’re not trying to support a network that never caught on and that no-one uses.

I like Zola. You can integrate it with Lemmy comments: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/30018034

Not sure how lightweight it needs to be, but I use Ghost and it’s pretty simple and basic.

I am not sure about how lightweight they are (but I guess more than WordPress for sure) but on the federated side of things you have plume (https://joinplu.me/) and writefreely (https://writefreely.org/) that you can selfhost. Not super sure about how much you can customize them.

Maybe git+Jekyll+CD+web server?

You could setup some automation so you just create pages via Git.

Writefreely is super light weight and minimalist in its design. It also federates with mastodon.

Good luck! I did the same recently. I wrote my own blog system, though. I can share it with you, but I’m not sure it’s the best for anyone else, there were some shortcuts taken given I did not intend to share it.

You can check out my blog and let me know whether you want to try it: https://chrastecky.dev/ (or federated: !programming@chrastecky.dev, !3d-printing@chrastecky.dev, !gaming@chrastecky.dev).

I use fuwari

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Ghost. I see a lot of bloggers running it. I’m not a blogger and I doubt anyone would be interested in what I had to say…lol…so I don’t have experience in that area. However, Ghost seems to be the ticket for bloggers. It integrates with thousands of services and some really great theme templates. If I were going to start a blog, that’s what I would go with. Jeremy over at Noted.lol has a write up about it and iirc, he uses Ghost for Noted.lol itself.

In order from little to bigger:

• any ssg like Zola or pelican
• mataroa.blog
• writefreely
• ghost
• lemmy :)

Would something like this interest you? Gemtext formatted to html is about as light weight as it gets. lots of automatic gemtext blog software on github that also formats and mirrors an html copy. Whenever a news page article gets rendered to gemtext through newswaffle it shrinks about 95-99% of the page size while keeping text intact. Let me know if you want some more information on gemini stuff.

I use eleventy. Similar to other static site generators.